Assignment 2

Press Release: Students Lobby for Snowboarding's Adoption as Vermont State Sport
http://www.burton.com/NewsAndEvents/News.aspx

The Burlington Free Press article:

This article talks about some sixth grade students in Vermont pitching the idea of making snowboarding the state sport. The students sat before the Senate Education Committee and proposed their case. They researched and gave great supporting ideas to why snowboarding should be the state sport. However, the students did run up against some counter-testimony. Parker Riehle, president of the Vermont Ski Areas Association, had come ready to propose that skiing and snowboarding should share the title. Overall I felt that the article remained neutral. It gave both sides to the story. I felt that this article did a good job using the press release as a starting point.
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008802200305

WCAX-TV News article:

This article was a lot shorter than the Burlington Free Press article. This article was very positive. It gave the impression that there was no counter -part to idea of making snowboarding the state sport. It was very short and brief compared to the other article written for the press release. I don’t think that this article used the press release very well. I felt that this article lacked information. I was not impressed with the lack of coverage the story had.
http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=7895439

Analysis:

I decided to research Burton snowboards. I went to their website and they had a section for news. There were several stories that I felt were news worthy. When I searched the different press releases, a lot of snowboarding websites came up as a result. I really wanted a story that was not on a snowboarding website, so I continued to search.

I used LexisNexis a couple of times and didn’t find any articles. I searched google and it gave me more of a variety. I found the process very time consuming, but I was able to do the research and find some articles written about the press release. I felt that the press release was relevant to story written. The story had a testimonial of a professional snowboarder which was very helpful for the article. For the most part I think the driving force to the article was the testimonials of the students.

In this particular press release, I found that the headline is an attention grabber. It used the word students which grabbed my attention. With a lot of the different press releases I found, the company used celebrity names in the sport. However, the angle that the company decided to use was probably not newsworthy.

Overall I enjoyed this assignment. It was good to see what it takes to have a news release actually picked up and written. I feel that I have learned about searching for data and the tools it takes.